Five Big Days for the record books

Big Day bird: Blackburnian Warbler on South Padre Island, Texas, by gman79.

Think you’re a hard-core birder? Well, consider this:

Chicago-area birder Beau Schaefer did monthly Big Days in Lake County, Illinois, for three years, from January 2013 to January 2016. He missed only three months out of those 36, so he was able to put together 33 monthly Big Days in a three-year period.

“I like Big Days for a number of reasons,” he writes in a feature article in our January-February 2017 issue. “Admittedly, they’re not for everyone, but I think doing one would make anyone a better birder.” In his article, he describes 11 lessons learned while doing the Big Days.

On one of them, he and fellow birders Andy Stewart and Eric Lundquist recorded 164 species, breaking a Lake County Big Day record that had stood for 20 years. The tally made us curious about other notable Big Day records.